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Supporting female performance in sport and fitness
Supporting female performance in sport and fitness

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5 What does the research say?

Any decrement in performance due to fluctuations in hormones is clearly a serious concern for athletes and their coaches. But is Eilish McColgan’s experience typical and most importantly how do fluctuations in hormones impact on performance?

Activity 5 Fluctuating hormones and optimising performance

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

Watch the video where Dr Emma Ross from The Well HQ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] explains the effect fluctuations in hormone levels have on the body, how they affect performance and how female athletes can use fluctuations in hormones to their advantage. Then answer the following questions:

  1. How does Emma account for the different experiences that females have during their menstrual cycle?
  2. What are your two key take away messages from this video?
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Transcript

EMMA ROSS
So what’s amazing about the menstrual cycle is that every woman’s experience of it will be different. And that will be in the context of her life, her diet, her lifestyle, her training, her nutrition, the stress she’s under. And if you imagine the fluctuating hormones of the menstrual cycle have receptors on cells all across our body, from our brain, our gut, our bones, our blood vessels, our muscles.
And so when those hormones are up or down, they are affecting us not just as part of our reproductive system, but physically and emotionally all across our body. And our sensitivity to those and the levels of hormones in each woman will be different.
So every woman’s experience of their menstrual cycle will be slightly different from the next. But what we do know is that physiologically, performance isn’t actually affected significantly by those hormonal fluctuations of the menstrual cycle.
So determinants of performance like strength, power, V02 max, that’s aerobic fitness, aren’t actually changed as those hormones change across the cycle, but the story doesn’t end there. We can’t just say performance won’t be affected because what is affected is how a woman feels physically and emotionally so we know that women can suffer symptoms, things like nausea, things like headaches, bloating, period pains, back pain.
And those symptoms will affect how a woman can train and perform on any given day. And actually the ability to manage those symptoms and get the best out of yourself on any given day is a real superpower of understanding your menstrual cycle.
So I think there are two things we can do to ensure that we can perform to the best of our ability on any day of our cycle and not be held back by our menstrual cycle. And one is improving our body literacy. And what that means is tracking your cycle and really understanding your experience of it.
When it’s giving you things that are helpful, like energy and motivation, and when it’s giving you symptoms that are challenging to your performance. And then being able to anticipate when that’s going to happen in your cycle and being proactive to do something about it.
And the second thing is opening up the conversation. And this is harder because we aren’t used to talking about things like periods and menstrual cycles, particularly in sport. But actually opening up the dialogue if you’re an athlete between your trainer or your coach, and allowing them to understand how your cycle is influencing you, and what they can do to help get the best out of you on any given day is a really, really helpful approach.
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Discussion

  1. Hormones have receptor sites on cells across the body and affect the brain, gut, blood vessels and muscles causing changing physical and emotional symptoms. However, each female’s levels of hormones and their sensitivity to the effects of hormones will be different. This is the reason why females experience their cycle differently and experience different emotional and physical symptoms.

  2. You may have different take away messages from these but you may have come up with the following.

    Firstly, that the impact of fluctuations in hormones will not affect your physiological capacity to perform. This is in terms of markers of performance, such as strength, power and aerobic endurance that don’t actually change as hormones change across the cycle. However, a female’s performance may be affected by symptoms that affect them physically and emotionally, such as nausea, headaches, bloating and period or back pain.

    Secondly, Emma advises that females improve their body literacy by tracking their cycles and understanding when hormones can make them more motivated and energetic and when their symptoms become challenging. This is important because if you can anticipate how you may be going to feel you can be proactive and make a plan for it.

    She also talks about the importance of opening up the conversation between female athletes and their coaches and trainers, so that the athletes can explain how their symptoms affect them and what the coach can do to get the best out of them on any given day.

To back up what Emma says an analysis by McNulty et al. (2020) that combined the results of 51 studies concluded that exercise performance in women is not significantly affected by any phase of the menstrual cycle. However, there is very little good quality research conducted on how the menstrual cycle impacts on performance. As a result it has not yet been possible to develop evidence-based guidelines for optimising exercise performance for women considering the menstrual cycle (McNulty et al., 2020).